Much of the slowdown in drug development has been caused by the accumulated weight of decades of regulatory requirements, piled one atop another over years. The paperwork burden alone can be enormous: Novo Nordisk’s former chief scientific officer once noted that the documentation required to request approval for two insulin products, if printed and stacked, would rise higher than the Empire State Building….
Slower and costlier trials are one reason the number of new drugs approved per billion dollars of research and development spending has roughly halved every nine years since the 1950s, with an apparent plateau in the past 10 years. Researchers have a name for this phenomenon: Eroom’s Law. It’s a deliberate inversion of Moore’s Law, the semiconductor industry’s principle of exponential progress. Whereas Moore’s Law tracks a world of compounding gains, Eroom’s Law shows the opposite: The more we spend on drug discovery, the less we get.
Source: “Doctors Who Discover Miracle Drugs Worry About Medicine’s Future,” New York Times.